Time for a little something

sex

I am back in Potch. My father is in bed with pleurisy and quite sick. As I only had the CI manual to finish start I thought I would come over and babysit him. We have abandoned the million-inch big screen in the lounge for the 70cm antique in the bedroom. I have the laptop in my lap, and am supposed to have my nose to the grindstone.

Instead I am responding to e-mail from an old lover while sharing my father’s grumpy happiness with the Lions’ Currie Cup victory over the Cheetahs earlier on. We are watching the Bulls whip Province, and are feeling equally pleased. We are Lions fans, but will support our neighbours in a game against any team hailing from a province that did not have the suffix “transvaal” tagged onto its name in the bad old days. For me this is simply a geographical marker, for my father… well, I am not sure. Anyway. His first loyalty lies with the Leopards (Wes Transvaal), actually, but after that, in order, with the other teams that live withing driving distance somewhere along the N12 to the North.

(This feels like an appropriate moment to offer my father’s rugby joke for the weekend.

I want to write many things that, unlike the corporate identity guidelines, will make no difference to my bank balance. Having finished my illicit correspondence for the morning, I now want to work on a 3rd Potchefstroom story. It will be called “Potchefstroom Mon Amour” and will be about being cold, footprints in the frost on the lawn, childhood memories of a smallholding called “Ommidraai” and the smell of the dry grass of the Highveld winter. But this will have to wait. First, to work. I have to work today because Thursday was, well, Sunday.

Anyway. While ruminating on the practice of spanking and the joys of literary pornography earlier on, I remembered the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Fiction Awards, and I wondered if they had been dished out yet this year. They have been, but were not as entertaining as last year I thought, so I am posting a few of the previous winners. (Just in case the papers are boring today.) The sex may have been bad, but the writing is, on occasion, wonderful.

Now, my parents should please note:

2003 Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal (Faber & Faber)

She’s taking off her blouse. It’s on the floor. Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed. In spite of yourself a soft whistle of air escapes you. She’s taking off her trousers now. They are a heap on the floor. Her panties are white and translucent. You can see the dark hair sticking to them inside. There’s a design as well. You gasp.
‘What’s that?’ you ask. You see a designer pussy. Hair razored and ordered in the shape of a swastika. The Aryan denominator…
As your hands roam her back, her breasts, and trace the swastika on her mound you start feeling like an ancient Aryan warlord yourself…
She sandwiches your nozzle between her tits, massaging it with a slow rhythm. A trailer to bookmark the events ahead. For now she has taken you in her lovely mouth. Your palms are holding her neck and thumbs are at her ears regulating the speed of her head as she swallows and then sucks up your machinery.
She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time…
She picks up a Bugatti’s momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen’s steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she’s eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion.

2005 Winkler by Giles Coren (Jonathan Cape)

And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.

2004 I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (Jonathan Cape)

Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, ‘Stop!’? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, ‘No, Hoyt,’ in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table.
***
Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns – oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest – no, the hand was cupping her entire right – Now! She must say ‘No, Hoyt’ and talk to him like a dog…
***
…the fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her public hair – what’s that! – Her panties were so wet down…there the fingers had definitely reached the outer stand of the field of pubic hair and would soon plunge into the wet mess that was waiting right…therethere

2002 Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam (Peter Owen)

She lay back on the bed while he positioned himself above her, then she slid her feet up his chest and on to his shoulders – Mr Hughes’s shoulders. She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr Hughes’s penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin. Enticingly rough yet soft inside her. The jargon he’d used at the consultation had become bewitching love-talk: ‘… dislocation of the second MTPJ … titanium hemi-implant …’
‘Yes!’ she whispered back. ‘Dorsal subluxation … flexion deformity of the first metatarsal …’
They were building up a rhythm, an electrifying rhythm – long, fierce, sliding strokes, interspersed with gasping cries.
‘Wait,’ Ralph panted. ‘let’s do it the other way.’ Swiftly he withdrew, arranged her on her hands and knees and knelt above her on the bed. It was even better that way – tighter, more exciting. She cupped his pin-striped balls, felt him thrust more urgently in response.
‘Oh yes!’ she shouted, screwing up her face in concentration, tossing back her hair. ‘Yes, oh Malcolm, yes!”

2001 Rescue Me by Christopher Hart (Faber & Faber)

Her hand is moving away from my knee and heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will towards the pole. And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pamela will not easily be discouraged. I try twitching, and then shaking my leg, but to no avail. At last, disastrously, I try squeezing her hand painfully between my bony thighs, but this only serves to inflame her ardour the more. Ever northward moves her hand, while she smiles languorously at my right ear. And when she reaches the north pole, I think in wonder and terror…she will surely want to pitch her tent.

2000 Kissing England by Sean Thomas (Flamingo)

It is time, time to fuck her. Now. Yes. Brupt, he rises, turns her over, flips her white body. Her smallwhite tidy body. She is so small and so compact, and yet she has all the necessary features… Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou are more compact and more
She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa.
Aiwa – She says, as he enters her slimy red-peppers-in-olive-oil cunt – Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

1999 Starcrossed by AA Gill (Doubleday)

‘…His tongue is long and hard and tastes of mint. We don’t say anything, but he pushes me to my knees in the middle of the shop. It’s difficult to undo his flies. I put my hand in. It’s hot and damp, and then, Christ; it’s amazing, huge. It just goes on and on, as thick as…’
‘As a magnum? A jeroboam? A methuselah? A bitter pump?’
‘A fucking salami. Shut up, John.’
***
‘…he takes his clothes off until he’s just wearing his boots. I hook my nails into his really taut bottom and he pumps and nearly chokes me.’
‘How did he get his trousers off over his boots? I mean, does he take his boots off and put them back on again?’
‘Shut up. I pull my dress off and I’m naked. He reaches down and roughly grabs me between the legs. I can feel his long, bony finger slip inside me. His thumb slides into the crack of my bottom and lifts me like…’
‘A bowling ball? A six-pack?’
‘Like I was light as a feather.’
***
She got to his cock and stuck it between her teeth like a cigar…

So. Race divides us. But in a society where money can fix almost anything except death and a very unfortunate personality, it should be possible to remedy the primeval inclination to be suspicious, even dismissive, of people who are different from you. That is why yet another faction of life coaches makes a fortune out of teaching the people with unfortunate personalities how not to be rude to people of other races at work, or, generally, in public. Although one can get slapped with a hate-speech charge, the equivalent of community service in such a case could mean having to attend the type of workshop-seminar-course (WSC) as described above.

You sit in a circle and talk about your feelings… I think… I saw on TV once. It was in The Lab. Which could also mean that the director had no imagination and simply took his cue from the hundreds of Hollywood movies he has seen about alcoholics. Probably you get the point.

I suspect these don’t work. There are reasons why some people are racist, which are not only ingrained, but irrational, and which somehow serves that person’s unfortunate personality. Most probably they never really liked themselves, just like all the nice people they ever met. So in order not to be lonely, all they really have to offer a group of more than one, is a common hatred of other races. They would delude themselves either that they are somehow superior to these races, or that these races are somehow the very and direct cause of their misery, purely by virtue of having a skin colour different from their own. As I said, irrational.

But because their hatred somehow, in a very mysterious and frankly cheerless manner, serves them, and binds them to others, I believe it cannot be fixed. So. All they could really learn from said WSC is to, for fuck’s sake, shut it.

In theory, if the race tolerance classes could work, then sex tolerance classes should too, and be far more useful, I think. I am not talking about learning to accept your boyfriend’s proclivity for pornography or sex in public places. No, I am talking about Julius Malema.

I guess what is most extra-ordinary about his refusal to apologise, is that Julius is under the impression that HE is the one who decides what constitutes hate speech. There are hundreds of white people who refer to black people as kaffirs, munts or brown-eyes, for example, and the majority of them will tell you that their use of such terms does mean that they are racist. These are just WORDS, they will insist, that they grew up with, and that is that. In the same way, men (black and white) will refer to women as chicks, birds, or bitches, and again, in their eyes, these are just words, these men don’t INTEND for these words to be offensive, and therefore they are not. The idea that we all have a right, by LAW, to dignity, and hence an obligation to respect said right of other people is really a concept beyond the reach of people who defend the use of racist and sexist terminology.

More than race, I think, sex divides us. And more than sex, stupidity does. Einstein (who supposedly also failed his final year in school so Julius is in good company), once said that “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

You cannot condemn a man for being an idiot. And since Julius is accusing Sonke Gender Justice Network’s Mbuyiselo Botha of being a white man who doesn’t like black leaders, it must be undisputed that Julius is as thick as two very short planks nailed together (nifty woodwork reference).

More alarming that this, however, is the failure of the ANC leadership, and particularly the almost 50% of women in that mix, to stand up and tell Julius to do the right thing. And for them to take him aside, and explain the terms “universal human rights”, “gender equality” and most of all, “respect”. They might insist that in the Julius Malema School of Politics, a course on universal platitudes must be compulsory (or they will tell the Chinese to take his funding away). For example, “it is better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all traces of doubt” would be excellent advice to anybody who ventures there, I am convinced.

Generally I find it all despicable; a grand display of a visionless, insensitive leadership. It is a failure to serve our democracy and to uphold the ideal of equality for all, regardless of race or sex.

…Ok… or creed, but I have my doubts about that one. It’s not something you are born with, and is easily changed or discarded. How can that possibly hold court with the other two?

Oh what sport. I got a message from somebody called Yannis (not Dimitri’s cousin, or even from the old country[1], I am sure) claiming that…

“These voicemails are FAKE. They are viral marketing for Dimitri The Lover’s upcoming Hollywood film. If you go to http://www.somewebsiteformysoginistsintoronto.com[2] you can visit his anti-metrosexual site, the Toronto Real Men. If you go to http://www.dimitrithedinosaur.com[3] you can visit his personal web site. He is a seduction guru with a sense of humour”

Yannis was objecting (I hope… he might have been stirring up interest instead) to my previous post and the MP3 of the (alleged) messages Dimitri left on some harassed woman’s phone. Well, seeing that I am about to embark on the investigative journalism chapter of my masters, I flew to these sites to check out his story. There was, unfortunately, nothing there to convince me that the voicemails may not be authentic.

I did think it strange that Dimitri claimed that the bizarre (ok… sexist, misogynist, and embarrassingly pornographic) animations on his site have been censored by YouTube, even as Yannis advertised the production of a Hollywood film, but I guess there is no accounting for the discrepancy between brilliance and bad taste of either. Either YouTube or Hollywood, I mean, not the Greek brothers. So far I have seen no brilliance in the guys whatsoever. I’ll believe the movie when I see it, I guess, is my last word on that one.

Ironically, it did occur to me that they may not be the real deal BEFORE Yannis intervened. In fact, my reply to Mandolin was…

“How fucking amazing. I thing (sic, I was in a hurry) HE’s the guy that writes all the Woody Allen movies.”

But Yannis has made it clear that Dimitri is real, living in Toronto, and unashamed. And incognito, as he only appears on the website in his attractive cartoon persona. But I am certain that I know his type, and have taken the liberty to post some more possible pictures.

[2] I had to change the website addresses because the truth is (I think), that I finally fell for The Spam (AKA, according to Yannis, ‘viral marketing’), and refuse to perpetuate it. I also refused to add a full stop at the end of the sentence. If these guys can’t write, that is their problem.

Does everybody out there read Hayibo? Well everybody should, because, let’s face it, it’s impossible to take anything one reads in the newspapers these days seriously without taking to drink at the same time.

For example: there is a thing such as World Hypertension Day? What? You send cards and flowers to people with high blood pressure? You eat boring food in solidarity? If it is an awareness campaign, I would like to argue that the people who suffer from hypertension probably know it already, and I am not sure what the rest of us should do. We should certainly not cook the recipes on the Verve pages.

We know that hypertension can lead to heart trouble and kidney failure, and, quite possibly death and/or having to pee into a bag through a pipe for the rest of your life. So, it’s very serious. But I don’t know if I could work my way through Angela’s low sodium recipes even if I was a death’s door and just won the lotto. Cottage cheese with meringues and raspberries? No! I am sure you don’t save a single mg of sodium by not using cream. And custard… Angela makes “custard” with 15ml of custard powder, 15ml of castor sugar and 180ml skim milk. How horrifying. Everybody knows that skim milk tastes like half-milk-half-water, and I would be surprised if the decrease in sodium is even the size of Julius Malema’s brain. What is the point of low-fat custard? Eat a nice, fresh apple if going large in the custard department is not your scene. You need three egg yolks for every cup of half-milk-half-cream, or just leave it alone.

(The polenta triangles sound quite good. I always try not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. But not being a baby person, I admit that I have failed in the past.)

Ruth’s ex, in spite of the good and even imagined reasons why we should have an aversion to both him and his memory, once said an interesting thing that I remember. He said (not verbatim, I am the writer here) that choosing to live sensibly by eating and drinking only healthy things, may not necessarily help you live longer, but it is certainly going to feel like that.

In the famed and ancient Washington Post Style Invitational that has been recycled in the SA blogosphere since at least 2006 as “THIS year’ neologism competition” (I have a very old post to prove how old it is) someone entered “decafalon” (entrants had to change, add or subtract one letter in a word and give it a new meaning), which is the “gruelling process of making it through the day consuming only things that are good for you.”

With her low-sodium proffering, Angela tried to condemn us to not only a long life, but clearly a miserable one. I am more a Dusty Springfield kind-of-a-girl: “being good isn’t always easy, no matter how hard I try” and a believer in the old adage that good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere.

I am beginning to notice that I my preoccupation with time is more than just the average, casual unease of a woman who has turned forty without making millions or marrying a millionaire. Being neither in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease nor peri-menopausal (that word is so new it does not even exist in my Office 2007 spell check) the panic that the minutes in the day inspire in me whenever I must make a decision on how to spend them is inexplicable. In the back of my mind there is something vastly more important and lucrative to do in any given moment, and I can never quite remember what it is.

The fact is that since I have given up working for a weekly fee to pitch my lot in with freelance writers and other poor people, the fiscal value of 60 seconds has acquired new meaning. And it is agonizing. I hardly start doing something without thinking that I should be doing something else. Except when I am working on my masters, which I will return to as soon as I have finished writing 700 words for no money whatsoever. I think of my masters as a weird form of punishment for resigning from a real job, and for the moment, not as something to improve my credit rating.

The past year has been one of both struggle and success.

I managed to get stories published without the editor in question being a member of my circle or friends or my alma mater, but learnt that it is impossible to actually make a living writing as a freelance journalist for websites, newspapers and magazines. You also have to do some copy editing, some teaching, and slide back into the odd TV job just to keep yourself in Crabtree and Evelyn body butter.

I discovered that the adult WASP male is unadventurous in bed and both surprised and ridiculously pleased when a woman doesn’t just lie there.